PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
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User ID: 890
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
3mo ago
I was not giving opinion on if "athletic" should be graded on a curve.
Brodski's weakness is low-status but an athletic woman's weakness is high-status.
In case this sentence wasn't clear, I can annotate it:
Brodski's objective!weakness is low-status but an subjective!athletic woman's objective!weakness is high-status.
There, I used "athletic" in the curve-grading sense, the same as you seemed to use it.
This kind of discussion confuses me sometimes, because a lot of men who aren't running 3hr marathons and can't climb 5.13b and can't sink a three pointer on an open basketball court love to shitpost about how stupid the idea of an athletic woman is.
Yes, you are dunking on average men because female athletes outperform them. The sting of your dunk is precisely because the idea of an objective!athletic woman is silly. It wouldn't take much for the average man to outperform her. The disrespect we show female athletes is precisely because a man at that level is also not praised or respected for it. The respect and praise is allocated based on status (and society's intuitions for who should be given it), not based on who can do what.
The existence of weight classes proves that the featherweight's objective!weakness is high-status.
That there is no league for short basketball players seems to prove that short king's objective!weakness is low-status. I suppose one could try to argue that short players are not outmatched in basketball to the same degree that light players are outmatched in fighting. Probably the team-based aspect of basketball makes it harder to analyze individual players. In some sense it is the team that is the player in basketball, and there is no such thing as a short team.
I do not think it is a coincidence that short stature in men is one of the classic incel status resentments. Furthermore, I've heard it (but have not looked into it) that the male height-income gap replicates better than the gender income gap. In other words, a man's height is a classic status marker.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
7mo ago
Related: As a software developer I can make a small change at work to save the company hundreds of thousands in processing costs or performance SLAs. Is my work really worth that amount, and should developers be paid according to what they're 'owed' instead of just a salary? (Ignoring the boring question of "only the salary was negotiated")
Aside from the practical issues of how to measure each developer's 'worth' (or maybe I am drilling into the details here), the fact is the savings are only possible because of the massive platform and software that the company already has, which I did not create.
The charger is critical to the win, but a bystander demanding too much money is being an asshole. Your struggling startup is obviously providing most of the value.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
8mo ago
Sharing links seems like a reasonable...reason to text, since you can't say links. I suppose also if they want to dissuade prying ears (the adults in the room).
But, I have a sneaking suspicion that fondness for texting is related to the younger generation's socialization problems. Usually people point out that technology causes awkwardness, but I imagine there is a feedback loop here: If you're bad at reading body language and tone, you might prefer the clarity of text.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
9mo ago
I should probably switch companies because at my company our sales isn't so much problem-solving as it is about warm and fuzzy vibes.
Virtually every feature I've ever worked on seems to have no users whenever I query prod. I assume the same goes for nearly all features in our Frankenstein's monster of a monolith. Instead, 99% of the product's value comes from this miniscule percent of product loops and workflows written by some senior architect 20 years ago.
Still, we're told all our features are very important to sales. You see, I don't work for a software company like I think I do -- I work for a sales company. The defects I fix weren't caught by users, but by internal sales engineers. The purpose of these bells and whistles is to give the client warm and fuzzy feelings that our product is better than the competition. Naturally these features don't solve user problems because they go unused! And the shot-calling higher ups who sign the contracts and see the demos aren't actually our users -- they are our users' boss's boss.
Still, it would be wrong to say we demo vaporware (it does work, although probably not as robust), or to say the features don't provide company value. They win deals (presumably). But our software engineers are jaded because we're usually not solving user problems.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
10mo ago
The supposed circularity of woman is just whenever people use quotes to say something like identifies as "woman." You sidestep that by changing the word to "ma'am" but what if someone says, "err, but you're not a ma'am"? Then you need to define ma'am and then you might run into some circularity.
If you don't want to define ma'am then it turns out woman is just a cluster unified by an arbitrary desire to be called a certain word. Realistically, it's also an arbitrary desire to be treated a certain way in general.
With tall and nerd you don't need to make reference to "quoted" "labels" and self-ID, so you are unlikely to run into any circularity.
I will re-iterate that the supposed circularity is not really the objection to trans activist policy and culture proposals. A significant part of the population thinks the trans desire is unreasonable. The circularity of the new woman definition is a strategy to give trans people what they desire (certain social privileges and connotations).
For me, the pleasure of the sex seems dependent on if I can bench press her or not. This reality means I haven't enjoyed having sex in years. It has nothing to do with not having any sex; or with not having new partners.
I will volunteer and raise my hand and say the reality is porn is just better than my sex. This also doesn't seem like my fault.
Edit since people are taking me very literally: sex does not include bench presses, instead it is a funny euphemism to mean, "i enjoy it if she is not obese." It has the added benefit of ironically warding off accusations that I should go to the gym more. If these women were as active as I am (and I've gone through cardio and weightlifting phases) then I would be able to bench press them.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
20d ago
limited by real social interactions
Come now, when you rig the game like this then of course porn is better than sex. I don't think that's under debate
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
20d ago
Destructive how? Presumably methamphetamine destroys the body, or is gross, so I should not do it. I suppose if someone is in a social circle with enough social pressure then it might be worth the tradeoff to partake though (see also alcohol).
Being selfish and NEET on the other hand doesn't seem as obviously destructive. Maybe the kids would think so if they replaced the anti-drugs PSAs with anti-Fortnite ones.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
20d ago
Let's assume videogames and porn do not satisfy the reportable (conscious) mind as well as sex does, such that everyone agrees sex is much, much better. Could it still be that they satisfy the mechanistic actuating drive (chemicals and what not) just as well, so that it is still right to say porn and videogames obviate the need for sex?
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
22d ago
The "You also value my property more than your life" meme but its Israel aiming a missile reading "You also value my citizens more than your own"
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
1mo ago
I think his wording was intentional. His desire to believe true things outweighs his desire to believe Christianity is true. And being unable to imagine a world where its true doesn't follow from what he said, just that on balance he thinks this isn't that world.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
5mo ago
Small point but I imagine that split-screen videos of Family Guy and Minecraft are ways to elude automated copywrite detection. At least, Youtube Family Guy clips have weird oddities like that for that purpose.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
7mo ago
Lastly, it seems self limiting: as women drop out of the relationship market, the women who choose to remain in it move up in terms of the quality of the men they can get.
Seems that the discerning liberal woman can use the Trump victory as a plausibly deniable way to get the competition out of the market. I won't say all the American 4B'ers are "in on the joke" but maybe the most rabid are? See also: "wokefishing," and a post in this space a couple years back suggesting that a lot of progressive-coded dating dynamics are because the gender ratios of woke spaces skew heavily female.
If 4B was a cup size, how big would it be?
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
9mo ago
Im probably ignoring the spirit of your post, which is Christian. But I'm curious. What happened to those 5 girls after you broke up with them? Do you know if they actually abstained from further sex until marriage?
If they didn't, I think they refused to put out for you because they just didn't feel lustful passion for you. There was no repentance involved. Of course, it is awkward for them to say that. Once is happenstance and twice is coincidence, what do you think five times is?
I think your conclusion, that you were jealous, is correct by the way, regardless of their sincerity.
I'm an example single-by-choice bachelor (exactly as boring and without compelling vibes as you'd expect for a Motteposter).
The reason it makes sense to spend time and budget on lifting, hobbies, whatever is that there is guaranteed return on those things. If you are doing them wrong or struggling, and you ask people what you're doing wrong, people are helpful and they don't call you entitled for expecting to e.g. get gains because you work out. If you spend money on a hobby, it is normal to expect to have fun.
My (and maybe others?) learned helplessness with dating is that there is no return on investment. The average advice you find is probably anti advice. The idea that dating is like a hobby or like lifting, that you put in as much as you get out, is frankly contradicted by the zeitgeist.
"Bee urself" and "she'll find you" are cope: you're right. But we have to say it. If we admit otherwise, like you do, then we are admitting: people are entitled to dating success if they put in time and effort. You can't have it both ways.
And saying people are entitled to dating success would prescribe all sorts of patriarchy.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
10mo ago
On the topic of YouTube comedy that is politically adjacent but isn't really mudslinging:
There are lots of videos on various topics where the authors commentary is delivered by AI voices of Trump, Obama, and Biden. They're usually called "Presidents ... do X" (e.g. play a videogame, react to a trailer).
These might allude to current events but the focus is usually not the presidents or the politics, it's usually the content (like the game or trailer)
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
10mo ago
If there was information women are willing to share, then most likely it would already be public and be written by some female journalist. Topic-obsessed men would have read it ten times over.
There is an oft-repeated fact that conservatives pass the ideological turing test more than liberals do (because of the media landscape, and what is polite to say in public)... I would like to assume that men pass the sexual turing test more than women do (because of the media landscape, and what is polite to say in public)
There is, admittedly, a big reason why these are disanalagous. Women are probably hard wired to know how men think. Or rather, female hard wired behavior is behavior as if she knows how men think. Consider: better emotional intelligence/theory of mind/pressure to navigate physically stronger hostiles, etc.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
10d ago
The purpose of inventing the term "emotional labor" is to justify why nurses etc. deserve more wages or more status. It would be strange for them not to be complaining about it
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
1mo ago
I broadly agree. For a certain subset of owners, they've literally labeled themselves as virtue signalers.
I have now seen Tesla's with bumper stickers that read "I bought this before Elon was a Nazi" or something to that effect.
They are showing themselves to be virtue signalers, but that doesn't mean they bought an EV to signal how much they cared about the environment. It just means they claim they wouldn't buy a Tesla in 2025, which is just being sensitive to social stigma; perhaps it also means engaging in political boycotts.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
1mo ago
The grandparent comment is skeptical that AI will ruin the online media landscape, comparing AI to brown third-worlders (Indians and Indonesians), who have been writing slop for years:
The idea that the internet will soon be swamped in AI generated nonsense isn't convincing either, since Indians and Indonesians were always cheap and could reliably hash out SEO slop for pennies on the dollar.
Whether AI is better than (the more expensive) white writers is relevant to if AI writing will lead to a paradigm shift or if its just kind of the same old at a slightly different scale.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
6mo ago
I'm not familiar with the discord takeover, but hasnt the sub had a "no CW" rule for a long time? The redditification of the subreddit seems to coincide also with Scott's new blog, his new writing, and his blog's new comment section.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
10mo ago
Welcome to themotte!
People who think gender is defined circularly have a certain intuition about words - namely, that words don't really mean anything. These are usually highly systematizing people who would feel at home in a math textbook. In math, there is no particular reason why the particular words are used. Math could be done with random words as long as the relationship between the words is the same relationship as in our real math. This kind of person is over-represented in this forum many times more than in real life because of this forum's genetic history. Go back 15 years and some of the people on this website were reading a systematizer systematizing things
The reason why they would say these definitions are circular is because these definitions revolve around the use of the literal word "ma'am." If we played the randomize-the-word-keep-the-relationship, it starts to look kind of empty to say something like
A fnord is someone who wants to be called "ma'am"
So what is the meaning of the word "ma'am?"
In any case, I'm not sure "circular definitions" are the true objection to following trans-activist policy and culture proposals. You have a reasonable desire, which is for people to treat you a certain way. I think "transphobia" really is the best word for the reason why people don't treat a trans person like they desire.
Likewise, widespread shortphobia among straight women is the reason why society doesn't treat short kings like people.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
10mo ago
If you're curious, those questions come across to me like, "Are you worried about dying?" or, "Don't you want to live longer?"
(To speak plainly and literally, the short answer is "yes" and the long answer is "yes, and?")
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
11mo ago
Harm is not what we are intuitively referring to is it? Trace and LOTT are enemies in a conflict just like Scott and Cade are. "Harm" language could just be a rhetorical tactic in the conflict.
Surely ICE deporting people is actually just normal? And everyone's overreacting because everyone's emotional setpoint has adjusted to the last administration.
Isn't "martial law" the US-equivalent of your list here?
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